I Know Why Some Scientists Can’t Tolerate FOI Requests

It’s because those e-mails will make them look and sound petty and manipulative, with all those white and not-so-white lies peppered around, the fence-sitting dominating their writings, the brown-nosing, the bullying, the cult of their personality, the disdain of outsiders.

And so FOI requests can destroy a lot of the veneer of hypocritical respectability, professionalism, “cool” image of the fearless purveyor of what reality is about.

Sad isn’t it…and still, it shouldn’t take a PhD to understand that you should consider anything you write on the internet as something that could be put up tomorrow as first-page news. Or should it?

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I believe that it is vital to cite ones source if one is claiming to have superior knowledge
on a scientific subject. Climate Change and Global Warming to give two examples.

The point about PhD qualified academics is that they have had to quote all their sources
in the theses they have written to obtain a doctorate in the first place.

Therefore it follows that no qualified scientist should ever complain about providing data under the Freedom of Information Act unless they have something to hide from the rest of us, should they?

Another thought. Some academics especially those who form part of the so-called scientific consensus on Global Warming like to be considered as occupying the ‘high ground’ in the debate. Why?

A PhD is normally based upon extensive and lengthy research in a very narrow and specific field, it has to be original research to qualify under the academic criteria for this degree to be granted and then only after thorough peer review.

The value of FOI is that it can flush out material data either in support or in complete contradiction of an argument. The value of the FOI Act therefore should never be underestimated.

The value of information published on the internet is often ridiculed but surely the benefit is that this can be shared with everyone on the globe instantly and without cost. To have genuine strength however and therefore academic value the source has to be fully cited.

What you say is not only true for Climate, but most of Academia. They cannot tolerate dissent. It is why most of academia is populated by like thinking people, and why they make poor debaters. Students look up to them as some sort of Rama, when in fact they are no different from us (except most of us have real world experience). It gets to their heads and makes them intolerant of criticism or dissent.

There are a few that manage to keep themselves grounded in reality. But sadly not many. And sadly they do exert a lot of influence on the wide eyed naive students that eventually have to unlearn the useless lessons of ego centric professors.

My longest experience in Academia has been in the area of Magnetoencephalography. I do remember meeting some of the victims of the infighting, one of them forced to move to a different continent, another living a nomadic life. I can’t imagine what it must be like in a heavily-politicized field such as climate change.